How we see it

Food for thought from some of our team and the experts, strategists, researchers and writers we work with…

Caveat emptor applies to awards too

By Neville Wells

“I have been looking at the reports that have been short-listed for awards to get an understanding of what the best content is”.

On the face of it, this seems to be a good idea, but something was niggling, so we tested the theory. We took the short-lists from several different award schemes that focus on content and benchmarked them.

The quality of the short-listed content covered the spectrum of performance, quite literally, from top to bottom. The winners were marginally better – they just covered the range from top to average.

Which means that copying even the winners might not be the best way of improving the quality of content. Especially if that work is itself based on poor understanding and/or contains regulatory and legal errors (or even copying of earlier short-lists).

Neville Wells is Langsford’s independent expert on narrative reporting and best practice.

The new strategic imperative: Digital Transformation

By Peter Ellis

The buzz phrase of the moment. However, unless you’re a behemoth like Disney, signing off on a $1B budget to roll out their ‘MyMagic+’ Digital Transformation, you’re maybe wondering what should be your approach with resources considerably south of this figure?

Sadly there is no magic programme for digital transformation. There is no one size fits all. Each organisation needs to find its own way to adapt their brand to the new digital reality. This is not entirely surprising given the whole concept is based on customers becoming more digitally sophisticated, progressively changing the way they engage with each organisation’s products and services.

Whatever outcomes your transformation unveil, it’s likely you’ll need your website and data to work smarter for you – you’ll need to harness that elusive Single Customer View using your website’s database and by getting your other systems speaking to each other. And that, in a sense, would be a kind of magic!